


Margins

by andchaos



Series: Revival [2]
Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Getting Back Together, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Post-Canon, Post-Reboot, Post-Series, WOW a super warning for, but mostly just about them growing back together, i just cant stop writing get back together fics for rory's beaus, uh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 20:58:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8683105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchaos/pseuds/andchaos
Summary: In the morning, Rory got an abortion.In the afternoon, Jess was there.





	

 

            In the morning, Rory got an abortion.

            She never told Logan about it, any of it—not the kid, not that he was probably the father, not that she almost got on a plane and made his whole world come crashing down. She wouldn’t take him from his fiancée, and she wouldn’t tie him down to Stars Hollow when he had important business and a life to live over in London and she had books to write and cities to conquer back in the states. She loved him too fondly for any of that. He was not her father, and she was not her mother. The memory of them deserved to be preserved exactly how they had both wanted, the two of them lost somewhere in New Hampshire in a bed and breakfast that Colin had bought out, wearing silly clothes and promising not to rescue each other anymore. He could live like that in her head, a picture-perfect face, with early morning light slanting in and the clock of life stopped for just a little while their hearts beat in sync.

            She knew he remembered them that way, too. His voice—“Yeah, just like that”—and her with a little smile on her face as he walked away. They had always been that way, two people with a superpower to freeze time. Maybe one day they would see each other again. But not for now.

            No, she would never take that all away from him, no matter how life had muddied the memories for herself. So she talked it through with her mother—she spent days talking it through with her mother. They settled on the matter one night a week later, Lorelai saying that she couldn’t make Rory’s decisions for her, and Rory realizing that she had always kind of known what she had to do. And in the morning, she got an abortion.

            In the afternoon, Jess was there.

            She stopped on the front walk when she was coming home, and he was sitting on the front steps. Just sitting there. He must have heard her coming because he looked up, and her breath caught somewhere deep in her lungs. Her throat was raw and her cheeks were red, and she hadn’t spoken a word since she had walked into the clinic that morning.

            She just looked back at him, wondering if he knew—by the look on his face, he did. She wouldn’t really be surprised; Jess had always been on the exact same page as her, in the exact same book. Even their copies were the same, each with the same notes in the margins.

            There was a long silence.

            “Your mom told me where you’ve been,” he said.

            Rory nodded. Of course.

            “Oh,” she said back.

            “Yeah. Not any details, you know, but just…where you’ve been. Don’t be mad at her, I knew something was up and forced it out of her.” He shrugged one shoulder and got to his feet, using the railing to pull himself up. He smiled that special Jess smile, not quite infused with happiness, but there was understanding and a whole lot of love, for sure. “I thought maybe…you could use someone to talk to.”

            The end of his sentence was pulled up like it was a question instead. The raw feeling in Rory’s throat returned in full force, and her eyes filled quickly with tears that did not yet spill. She nodded, vigorously, and then began to cry.

            “Yeah,” she gasped out. “Yeah, Jess. I’d like that.”

            He wiped her tears away with his thumb and then slung his arm around her shoulder and spun them back around, they walked together like that back into town. Rory was far too exhausted to wonder what people might say about the two of them, walking around like this. She didn’t care. She wound her arm around his waist and was so relieved, really, to be there with him. Jess was warm, the outside world was cold; Jess made her heart feel finally calm.

            They got coffee to go from Luke’s and Luke didn’t ask them where she had been. Rory was sure Lorelai hadn’t told him too, but maybe he saw something in her face, or in the way she and Jess were holding each other. He didn’t say anything about that, either. Rory liked that about Luke; he never asked too many questions. He only ever asked just the right ones, and he didn’t pester her now. She thanked him in a quiet voice for the coffee and she and Jess turned back around and went outside. They didn’t talk about it. Their feet just seemed to silently agree to take them around town, so they walked.

            It took nearly twenty minutes of pensive silence for Jess to get up the nerve. Actually, Rory wasn’t sure it was nerves keeping him even more uncommunicative than usual. Maybe it was just those Danes genes. Jess always knew what to say, too, and when to say it.

            “Why did you do it?” said Jess at last.

            He didn’t expand, though Rory was sure he had more questions than that. She scratched her nail against the side of her coffee cup and thought for a long time.

            “I want kids someday,” she said, “I do, I really do. Just not like that. No way.”

            Jess gave a wry smile. “No shade to Lorelai, I’m sure.”

            “Shut up, you know I didn’t mean it that way,” said Rory, elbowing him in the side. The chuckle she gave then felt foreign to herself, so at odds with the rest of the day.

            “So what is it then?” asked Jess. “Not with him?”

            Rory sighed. She didn’t even want to go down that road, not now, not with him. Aside from only being able to hazard a guess at the father (though who was she kidding? It had never been anyone else’s) she had no desire to drag Jess all the way back there. Rory was already stewing in how very much she was reliving her younger days, and her mother’s. Jess didn’t need to, too.

            “Not like that,” she repeated.

            Jess did not ask questions. He took it in stride, nodding thoughtfully at the ground, and drank more of his coffee. Rory did, too, eager to have something to do with her mouth.

            “Are you okay?” Jess asked finally. “I know you probably had a rough morning.”

            “Yeah,” said Rory on a great exhale. She rubbed at her eyes again, though she wasn’t quite crying again. “I just…I don’t know. I know it was the right thing to do, for me. It’s just…”

            “It’s a lot,” he guessed.

            Rory dipped her head, nodding. She whispered, “It is a lot.”

            They said nothing for a long moment. Rory couldn’t stop staring at the ground, transfixed, lost completely in her own head. It had been the right decision for her, but still—she would be wondering about the possibilities and the _what if_ s for the rest of her life.

            She didn’t know how long she stared at the ground and walked with Jess, but when she next refocused, the sun was in midafternoon. She realized they had been silent for a very long time, but Jess didn’t seem to mind. He was looking around at the clouds and the trees and the leaves on the ground, whistling idly. The hand not otherwise occupied around Rory’s shoulders had been stuffed deep inside his pocket, and if Rory had not known him better, she would never have guessed that his nonchalance was, to a degree, affected.

            “I didn’t finish my coffee,” Rory realized numbly. “It’s cold now.”

            Jess said nothing. He gently pried the takeout cup from her hand and walked over to a garbage can set beneath one of the trees, part of Taylor’s crusade against littering. Her hand was still outstretched when he returned, like she was still grasping onto something. He carefully slipped his hand into hers and said nothing, just squeezed.

            “Come on,” he said quietly. “Let’s do something fun to take your mind off things.”

 

            That was how they began to go to the library together whenever Jess was in town. He only managed to come down some weekends or the odd day of the week, but he was always lingering around, visiting Luke for some reason or another. When he was down in Connecticut, they always made time for one another, and they would get a cup of coffee and sit in the library together for hours, trading books the other might like or just sitting between the shelves, giggling amongst themselves. It might have been weird, two people in their thirties sitting amongst the shelves, but it was Rory and Jess and nobody even looked twice.

            One afternoon, Jess told her he was moving to New York later in the month. He hadn’t even told Luke yet, but his publishing house was expanding and they wanted him to head up their branch in Brooklyn. He talked about visiting New York, the buildings and parks and venues he’d seen; he had even been to this one dance hall a couple of times, not like a nightclub but like actual an dance hall, the kind people went to so they could twirl each other around the floor with grace. Rory grinned at him the longer he talked about New York, watching how he glowed.

            “Jess, that’s such good news! Oh my god. You’ll have to show me all the good dance halls when I move to Queens,” said Rory.

            The natural light from the windows was in that soft space between autumn and winter, and they were sitting with their backs against opposite shelves, their legs stretched out alongside each other. Jess was alive and vibrant. He belonged in a city.

            Now, he grinned.

            “Wait, you’re moving to Queens?”

            “Didn’t I tell you?” she said, aghast. “Come on! I have to have told you.”

            “You did not tell me,” he said, shaking his head and smiling wryly. “Well, when?”

            “In the spring,” said Rory. “I already found a place and everything. I’m just waiting for the person who lives there now to vacate when their lease is up. They’re moving somewhere—Boston, I think. After March.”

            “That’s awesome, Rory. Really.”

            “It’s really small, you know,” she said, blushing, “but it will be a good place to get in my own head and write. Plus, it will be good to finally be living out on my own again. And now you’ll be there.”

            She couldn’t look him directly in the eye when she said that, but she saw in her periphery that Jess’s whole face had turned rose. She bit her lip, smiling.

            “You won’t believe what you can write when you actually have the space,” said Jess after a moment. “Which reminds me—did I tell you? My new book comes out in December.”

            “What?” said Rory, splaying her hand out on the floor and pushing herself up to sit straighter. “No! You didn’t tell me that! Jess, that’s amazing.”

            “Yeah, I’m actually proud of this one,” said Jess. “It’s really—well, you’ll see when you get it.”

            “I’ll be at the midnight release,” said Rory.

            They sat there grinning at each other for a few seconds. Rory slumped back against the shelf again, and after a while her attention started to wander. Her gaze lingered on the shelf over Jess’s shoulder, and she was so busy reading titles that she didn’t notice he was looking at her until she looked back over at him again. His gaze was soft but intense, like a slow-burning fire was roiling through him. She blinked back, surprised.

            “What?” she said. She giggled a little. “Come on, what?”

            He licked his lips, a nervous gesture. His smile wasn’t quite so lopsided anymore as it had been when they were kids, but the way he bit his teeth down into his bottom lip still was. Rory watched it, dazed. So much had changed, yet she still found herself completely stunned by Jess Mariano.

            “Rory,” he started, “I want to do something, and I want you to tell me if you don’t want me to.”

            Rory had to swallow convulsively around the lump that was suddenly in her throat.

            “What…” She cleared her throat. “What do you want to do, exactly?”

            Their legs were aligned across the aisle, but when Jess spread his, lounging them open with his knees propped up a little, he did it so they slid between either one of Rory’s. Her mouth was dry. He scooted a little closer to her and leaned forward, sliding the distance between them down to halfway what it had been.

            “Rory,” he said again, so quietly. She found herself entirely entranced with the way he said her name. He reached out with both hands and his fingers tickled her cheeks as he brushed them, sweeping his fingers back towards her temples, pushing her hair out of the way. He was even closer to her now. “Rory, you and I—that’s not something that went away. I’ve always felt like, I don’t know, like there was something we left unsaid. And I want you to tell me if you don’t want this too.”

            She swallowed again. “Jess, I—”

            The truth was, it wasn’t that Rory hadn’t thought about it. It had always been this question mark in the back of her head, this idea that she and Jess were a story that was not quite over yet. They had never really had a happy ending, because they had never really had an _ending_. Rory had always had this lingering feeling like they were a book where the pages hadn’t all been flipped through, because she had gotten distracted by other stories and pushed theirs to the margins of her head, and she found now that she really did want to get to the ending.

            She and Logan weren’t her mother and father, and she and Jess weren’t her mother and Luke. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t meant to be doing this, either, sitting in this library in the middle of Stars Hollow and asking each other if they wanted to extend out their heart, one more time.

            Rory nodded.

            Jess leaned forward the rest of the distance and kissed her.

            Kissing Jess wasn’t stepping backwards in time; it was stepping forwards. Maybe it shouldn’t have been. Maybe it should have felt like she was once again seventeen and putting her heart on the line for a boy that didn’t yet know how to love her back, or like being once again twenty-two and using him as a pawn in a game he didn’t want to play. But it didn’t. It felt, instead, like all of that ancient history was so far behind them and none of it mattered anymore. They had hurt each other and they had fought and they had found each other once again, and this time—this time it felt like they were finally in the same place.

            And not just because Jess was framing her face and kissing her so gently, spilling feelings down into her throat that mirrored and matched what she poured back into him. She touched his shoulders, his neck, tracing the lines of his collar just as reverently as he caressed her face. She hadn’t realized how starved she had been to touch Jess until she was doing it again, suddenly feasting after so long without food. She couldn’t breathe and it wasn’t because they had been kissing long enough for her to start getting heady. There was a tune pulling at the edges of Rory’s head but she couldn’t quite think what it was.

            They kissed until they didn’t anymore. They collapsed back against their separate shelves, but their legs were still spread open between each other’s. Rory pressed her lips together against a smile, looking down at her foot, tracing lines against the inside of Jess’s thigh. He reached out, and she twined her fingers easily through his. No, she was very much not seventeen anymore.

            When she looked up, Jess looked absolutely radiant. She knew that she was blushing, but she couldn’t help raising her face anyway, because she couldn’t stop looking at him. Jess was so different and so the same. There were all new sides of him now, and she wanted to get to know each and every one of them. He looked back at her like he was thinking the exact same thing; they didn’t say anything for a time, just looked at each other in the loudest silence that Rory had ever found herself in. It was good, though. Being with Jess had never required an abundance of words, because they managed to say so much anyway. She guessed she wasn’t too surprised that the two of them could read each other so well. If anyone could, of course it was them.

            “Hey Jess?” she said after a while. She was playing with his fingers against hers, and everything in her felt warm and content.

            “Yes, Rory?” he asked. He was playing with her fingers, too.

            She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Do people wear poodle skirts at dance halls, or am I making a hideous anachronism right there?”

            Jess laughed so hard he had to lean his head back to get all of it out better. Rory just looked at him laughing and grinned. Thrills ran up her arms. He looked so happy, as happy as she felt.

            “I’ll take you one day,” he said, settling down at last. “You can find out for yourself.”

 

            They still spent afternoons in the library together when he was in town, but it wasn’t like it had been before. Now, half the time they were talking and trading books and half the time it was him pressing her back against a shelf, his hand hot on her thigh and creeping dangerously up her skirt, and it was her pressing kisses against his neck and thinking how wild it was that they had rarely done this type of thing when they were teenagers. It was a whole lot of fun.

            They spent a lot of time outside, too. With the onset of the season behind them and the frigid New England winter upon them, oftentimes when Jess was there they walked around the town, dazzled by all the decorations and lights. Well, Jess spent a little more time looking at her, but Rory didn’t mind as long as she had ample opportunity to gawk at all the fairy lights strung up along the trees. Her coffee was always warm in one hand and Jess’s hand was always warm in the other, and Rory didn’t care that people in town were talking. All of their “Oh, _them_ again? Oh no,” and “Well, I hope at least _one_ of them is more mature now,” fell completely deaf on her ears. Jess always had something to say, even when he wasn’t talking, and it took up a lot of her attention.

            Rory was sitting at the kitchen table one day, having just seen Jess off on the front steps as he headed back to New York for the week.  It had been a lengthy goodbye, though without much talking involved, and now she was just sitting at the kitchen table and eating her weight in leftover pizza and thinking.

            The front door opened after a while of this and Lorelai poked her head into the kitchen.

            “Hey, kiddo,” she said. “Ooh, is that pizza?”

            Lorelai got a plate down from the cabinet and sat at the table with her. Rory asked how work had been and Lorelai asked about her day.

            “Oh that’s right,” said Lorelai, “Jess is gone again.”

            “No need to sound so thrilled,” said Rory, rolling her eyes.

            “I don’t have to like him still!” she protested. “I’m civil!”

            “Ish,” countered Rory. “I don’t get it. What’s wrong with Jess? He’s matured a lot since we were kids!”

            “Nothing’s wrong with Jess,” said Lorelai, but she was shaking her head. Rory went back to her pizza; she didn’t want to have this same argument again, and besides, it didn’t really matter. She was perfectly happy seeing Jess again either way.

            “Just… _stay_ civil,” said Rory.

            Lorelai held up her hands. “Jeez, alright, _Mom_.” They sat in silence eating for a minute, but Rory could tell Lorelai had something on her mind. She had a feeling they had not quite moved off the previous subject and so did nothing to broach the topic herself. At last, Lorelai said, “So are you and Jess moving in together when you go to New York?”

            “Mom!” said Rory, half-choking on the pizza she was chewing. Lorelai pounded her on the back.

            “Alright, alright. No more questions, clearly that’s moving a little fast for you. You’ve only been together for _years_ , and you’re both grown adults now. What was I thinking?”

            “I don’t think relationships work cumulatively like that,” Rory commented.

            “What do you mean? Of course they do. If you spend two years together, and then break up for two, and then get back together, you’ve still been with each other for two years.”

            “I don’t know if that applies here,” said Rory. “It’s been over a decade since me and Jess were a thing. Does all that time still carry over?”

            “Can there be a statute of limitations on relationships?”

            “I think there can,” said Rory.

            “No way,” said Lorelai. “I mean, say you’ve been together fifty years. Do the first few decades just not count because they were a long time ago?”

            “That’s different,” said Rory. “There’s no breakup in between. It’s the length of the breakup, not the length of the relationship.”

            “I see,” said Lorelai. “You’re very wise. Although I have to say, I’m the one that’s been married. Twice! And I got back with Christopher after a super long time and got married really quickly, and we didn’t have a problem with it. So I might have final say on the issue.”

            “You also got divorced in about five seconds,” said Rory. “So, you know. You can see how well hitting unpause works.”

            Lorelai thought about for a minute, then said decisively, “You’re right. Definitely no unpausing after you’ve been broken up too long. It’s too messy.”

            “I think it should be a five year statute of limitations on breakups before you’re not allowed to pick up where you left off anymore.”

            “Amen, sister,” said Lorelai, and they slapped their slices of pizza together like they were toasting.

            They got back to the business of eating with special concentration, and the conversation lulled. Rory was still mulling over what her mother had said, though, and after she was feeling less hungry and able to slow her vigorous eating, she spoke up again.

            “I’m not moving in with him,” she decided. “Not right away, anyway. I mean, we never talked about it. Besides, I just want my own place for a while, you know? I mean, me and him can still be together in New York. We can see each other way more often than we do now. This way I have my own space to write, and I still get Jess. It’s a win-win situation, really.”

            “Well, I think that’s very mature of you.”

            “I’m thirty-two, Mom.”

            “And yet it somehow feels like an achievement.”

            Rory shouldered Lorelai, and Lorelai laughed. They went back to eating in silence, too busy focusing on finishing off the rest of the pizza to talk much.

 

            Jess’s apartment was bigger than hers, but still cramped and tiny. His furniture was dingy and he had stockpiles of cheap booze in his cabinets, which Rory appreciated, because he was very generous with it. Despite the obvious flaws, though, Rory liked the place anyway. The writer vibes practically oozed off the walls.

            She had moved to New York two months ago, and she would guess—she didn’t have the exact logistics of it all, but she would estimate—that she had spent half of that time in Jess’s apartment with him. Now they were splayed out on the floor together playing a card game with the lights dimmed low and something instrumental on the radio. Rory was just in one of Jess’s big t-shirts and her mid-calf socks, because she had gotten bored getting fully dressed before. Now she sat cross-legged, trying desperately to win at rummy.

            “What’s your secret?” she said as she lost another round spectacularly to him.

            Jess laughed, shrugging. “Being better than you?”

            “Modesty always was your best quality,” she said.

            Later, they got bored and they sat together, squeezed into the same armchair, and turned on the TV. They found Pulp Fiction playing, but they had both already seen it a handful of times and after a while Jess started running his hand up and down her bare thigh, and it was very distracting. She gave up entirely around the forty five minute mark and twisted around on his lap, straddling him, and he was all too generous kissing her back.

            When they got up off the floor an hour later, she did not bother to get dressed this time. Instead, she just threw on one of his sweatshirts that was lying around to combat that slight draft in the apartment and went into the kitchen to make something to eat.

            “What do you want for dinner?” she called over her shoulder. “Soup?”

            “Soup?” he repeated incredulously, and he was right behind her. She jumped when she felt his hands on her hips, but then relaxed back against him. He started pressing his lips to her neck, all over the place and aimless. “You want soup?”

            “No, but I distinctly remember being here yesterday, and all there was to eat was soup. Like, stockpiles of it. Which reminds me: Why do you have so much soup?”

            She had been reaching back to run her fingers through his hair, but now he spun her around by the hips. She wrapped her arms around his neck, relaxing back against the counter. He pressed close to her.

            “What do you have against soup?”

            “I don’t have anything against soup,” she said. “I’m just curious.”

            He sighed. “Liz keeps sending me gift baskets, and they’re, well, from Liz.”

            “Ah,” said Rory, drawing out the sound. “That explains it.”

            “It does, doesn’t it?” He cocked his head. “So…takeout?”

            “Takeout,” Rory agreed fervently. “You get the menu, I’ll get the phone.”

            “Yes, ma’am.”

            They sat on the floor to eat through their containers and containers of Chinese food. Rory was consuming most of the stockpile, though Jess was doing his fair best to keep up. As she dug into a new box of lo mein, she looked up and saw him just looking at her. She paused, chopsticks raised in the air.

            “What?” she asked.

            He shook his head slowly. He said, “Even after all this time, your appetite never ceases to amaze me.”

            She grinned. “Shut up,” she said.

            She started eating again. Jess was quiet. He had apparently eaten his fill, because he was just leaning back on his hands, watching her. She thought it was about the food again for a couple of minutes until he said abruptly, “Move in with me.”

            Rory nearly choked. She swallowed her mouthful of noodles with a tremendous amount of effort and took several gasping breaths before she coughed out, “ _What_?”

            Jess was just looking at her completely serenely. His eyes were soft and his mouth was upturned a little at one corner. When she said nothing after that for a long minute, he got up from the floor and half-crawled over to her, pushing the takeout containers out of the way as he went. He paused to take the chopsticks and lo mein from her frozen fingers, put them carefully to the side, and kissed her gently. He held the sides of her face between his hands and feathered kisses all across her nose and cheeks and the rest of her face, and when he seemed satisfied, he breathed, “Move in with me, Rory.”

            “I can’t,” she said automatically. “I have my apartment for another four months.”

            He shrugged one shoulder easily. He kissed her soundly on the mouth again and then sat back, just gazing at her.

            “Well, when your lease runs out then,” he said.

            Rory just blinked at him. “But I only just got here.”

            Jess’s forehead crinkled slightly. She found that she very much did not like to see that look on his face and reached out to touch the lines with her fingertips, smoothing them out, and he relaxed under her touch.

            “Do you not want to?” he said.

            Rory startled at the suggestion.

            “No, of course I do,” she said. “I just—we’ve only been together for a couple of months.”

            Jess tipped his head to one side. “More than half a year.”

            “Less than a full year.”

            “What about all that time when were kids? I know you, Rory. Who says we can’t just pick up where we left off?”

            Rory swallowed. She had so many arguments about why they couldn’t, but for some reason she couldn’t think of any of them now. Jess was back then, kissing her over and over and over again, and then she was kissing back, and she had no idea what any of her protests might once have been then.

            When she next opened her eyes, it was only because he had stopped kissing her for longer than a second. He was still hovering close, a soft smile on his lips, his forehead close to touching hers.

            “Move in with me,” he whispered, one more time.

            Rory reached up to touch his wrist where he was cradling her face again. She leaned up and pressed the softest kiss to his mouth, but it was intense somehow too, and she needed a stilted moment before she could let go. Then she sat back on the floor and slowly, slowly, opened her eyes.

            “Okay,” she said.

            Jess grinned. Looking at him smile like that, Rory thought that she didn’t care about any of the rules. That look, and him, were the only things that mattered in the whole entire world.

 

            They got an apartment together in Brooklyn, because that’s where Jess’s publishing house was and Rory didn’t really care where she lived, as long as it was in New York and she could write and as long as she had Jess there, too. It was a little bigger than either of their separate places, but not by much.

            He worked long hours at his job and she picked up work as an assistant at a media company. It gave her plenty of time to write her book, both during the day and when she got home, as well as giving her a chance to get some experience at the company and maybe, one day, rise up to be a reporter or a journalist.

            She liked her job, and she liked writing on the side, but her favorite part of the day was when she and Jess sat on opposite ends of the sofa and wrote together. It was mostly silent when they passed the time like that, leaning against opposite armrests and typing away. Somebody’s legs were always over somebody else’s or they were tangled up together, but Rory like it that way, that silent comfort of knowing Jess was with her. They had never had to say too many words to one another.

            One night, after they had both hit their word count goals for the night and they had agreed to put their laptops aside and watch a movie together, Rory cuddled up with him on the couch beneath the same big blanket. Jess found a show about people running around with special powers, which Rory found weird but oddly intriguing. They touched idly; his hand on her thigh there, drawing out nonsense patterns, or her playing with the collar of his flannel shirt. He had one of his arms around her and she kept glancing up to look at his face, just because, which was fine because he kept doing the same thing to her. Whenever they caught each other at the same time, they would smile a little before their attention strayed back to the show.

            At some point, Rory started to doze. Jess tucked her more comfortably against his chest and she drifted in and out consciousness. She thought maybe Jess did too, because the next time she was fully awake, the TV was playing an infomercial that seemed to have been playing for a long time already. She shook him gently.

            “Huh?” he mumbled.

            “We fell asleep, I think,” said Rory.

            Jess rubbed at his eyes. “Oh. What time is it?”

            “I don’t know,” she admitted.

            “We should go to bed.”

            “We should,” she agreed.

            They didn’t move, though. Now they were both awake, but still, neither made any effort to get up or even to change the channel. They just sat there, quiet. Rory brushed her fingers along his shirt. Jess swept her hair away from her face.

            “Rory, I want to ask you something,” he said. “I just don’t want you to freak out, or think I’m angling for anything. I’m just curious.”

            Rory looked up at him, her brows pulling together.

            “Well, obviously I’m nervous now.”

            Jess smiled, just barely. “Of course you are,” he said, “but don’t be.”

            He said nothing for a moment. Rory tugged on the collar of his shirt.

            “Well, ask me then,” she said, rolling her eyes.

            He let out a breathless laugh with no humor at all in it and ran his free hand through his hair. She let him gather and organize his thoughts for a minute. Clearly he had dived into this conversation entirely unprepared.

            “Do you remember when we first started talking again?” he asked at last.

            “Well, Jess, we never really stopped talking. I guess we didn’t see each other much for a couple of years, but we still talked.”

            “Right. Well, after that,” said Jess. “Right after Luke and Lorelai’s wedding, remember? You came back and I was sitting on your steps.”

            Rory’s stomach clenched. Of course she knew what he was talking about, but she so rarely thought about that day anymore. When she did—when it crept up on her and she couldn’t avoid it—she did not look back on it fondly. The memory bristled and pricked at her, and she felt like that rawness from that morning was lurking at the edges of her consciousness, ready to strike if the opportunity came.

            “Yes,” she said guardedly.

            “Do you remember what you said? About why you didn’t want to keep it?”

            “Jess, what are you talking about?” she said. “Why are you bringing this up again? That was almost a year ago.”

            “Right. But do you remember?”

            She sighed. “Yes, Jess, I remember. I told you—I told you that it wasn’t the right time. That isn’t how I…I mean, I want kids someday. Just not like that.”

            “Right,” he said again. He paused. “Well, do you ever think about…I mean. How then?”

            “Excuse me?”

            “If not like that, then how?”

            She paused. Rory was not a stupid girl by any means; if anything, Jess believed in her intelligence even more than she did herself. She was not oblivious to what Jess was saying, she just needed a moment to consider how to answer. And then another moment. And then another whole handful of moments, and the whole time, Jess said nothing, and he let her think. He always let her think.

            “I want that with you someday,” said Rory at last. “I do. I want a family, you know, eventually. And when I do, you know I want it to be with you.”

            Jess brushed his knuckles down the side of her face and said nothing for a long time. Rory leaned her head against his shoulder and cast her eyes up at him, waiting for him to say something, as patient as he had been with her.

            At last, he said, “I don’t want that right now either. It’s just something to think about. For someday.”

            “For someday,” she agreed. “Jess, you know, when I picture my future…it’s with you. It’s always with you.”

            “I know,” he said quietly. “Mine’s with you, too.”

            He looked so beautiful, sitting on their couch in their tiny little apartment, his face lit dimly with the brightness from the TV. Rory leaned up and kissed him just because, because they were together and they had carved out a life with each other and because she could. After all this time, it was really her and Jess after all. Their story was still ongoing, but maybe they had reached that chapter where things finally settled down for them. The waiting was over. There were no more “almost”s, just loose ends to tie up and an open ending to plan for. Together.

            After a while, they turned off the TV and Jess pulled her by the hand to bed. They curled up together beneath the covers, relentlessly intertwined. There was nothing but tomorrow and their wide open futures stretched out before them, and Rory thought that it was okay that they didn’t have the whole thing outlined just yet. She didn’t mind where the road took her now, as long as it had writing and possibility and Jess. It was not the end, not really; there were always more blank pages to fill.

            She settled down into bed. Jess’s arm was warm over her where they were tangled together. Rory thought about all the story that they still had left to go.

**Author's Note:**

> holy shit!!!! i love jess mariano & i'm so not sorry!!!
> 
> So, 2 PSes: one, the song that rory heard in her head when they first kissed in the library was totally definitely [starving by hailee steinfeld](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScjT8zvT7d0). and, at the very end, they were 100% definitely watching heroes.
> 
> i hope you enjoyed reading this as much as i enjoyed writing! ❤❤
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> [find me on tumblr here](http://freyias.tumblr.com/post/153781511370/)


End file.
